Course Update – Tuesday, 14 October 2025

Greetings BGC members, we’ve been hard at work helping Atlas Golf Services get the Green’s Replacement Program underway and they have been making great progress. No doubt you would have seen Greens 2, 7, 8 & the Chipper stripped and shelled, and now stolonized and growing in. The weather has been almost perfect for grow in, and it has shown with how well the sprigs took to their new home on those Greens.

2, 7 & 8 have been down for nearly 4 weeks, and have already received their first cut which is really promising. They’ll now get a heavy top-dress this week to even out the surface, which the stolons can spread into and grow through.

The Chipping green was sprigged a week after 2, 7 & 8 and is also showing a great strike, we will assess next week to see if it is ready for a mow before topdressing. On those out of play holes there has been plenty of work done to use the sand out of the greens, filling in low spots, drainage lines, creating new Tees on 2, 7 and 6 and some shaping on the 3^rd hole, between the creek crossover to try and mitigate the water overflow onto the fairway.

Greens 11, 12 & 13, have enjoyed a couple of weeks of rest, and are really healthy overall, with only a few areas left to fill in. Some plugging work has been done to assist this and they are receiving regular attention to get them up to speed for the end of the week when they come back into play. Greens 20 & 21 look to have suffered a bit of mite/nematode damage which we have targeted in recent foliar applications; we are trying to keep the water up to those greens as much as possible, often with a syringe during the day to keep them from drying out.

The last couple of months have been very dry, which has been a nice change from 9 months of rain. Fantastic for construction work and to get these greens ticking along. The downside of the lack of rain is that the Moolabin Creek tends to dry up quite quickly, so we are managing the water outputs on the Fairways and Tees to ensure there is plenty of water for the new Greens. A small shower over the weekend topped the catchment up which is good to see.

You would have noticed quite a hole on the 20^th Tee carry last week; this was excavated to repair one of our irrigations mainlines that had let go of a fitting last Sunday night (never ideal when you require constant irrigation to grow in new greens). Thankfully, it was right next to the 20^th/17^th pond, so the water didn’t go to waste or cause more damage and disruption to the course. Just one of those unfortunate unexpected challenges we face on the Golf Course.

Holes 10, 17 & 18 will be the next to come out of play, as Atlas should have Greens 1 & 9 ready for stolons at the end of this week. Once 10, 17 & 18 are done, they’ll head off-site for a few months, whilst we get 2, 7 & 8 grown in and ready for play before they come back to finish 14, 15, 16 and the Putting Green in the new year. Only 2 & ½ months left of the 2025, which has raced by, all going well, the next few months should do the same and before we know it, we will have the course back up to full operation early next year. Pressure is on the maintenance team during the grow in as we try to maintain the holes that are in play as best we can, whilst targeting a lot of the small project work on the out of play holes to ensure we are constantly improving the golf course.

Alex Balkey
Assistant Course Superintendent
The Brisbane Golf Club